


A life just begun

by ShootWithIntentToKill



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Clint Barton & Natasha Romanov Friendship, Gen, Natasha Romanov Joins SHIELD, SHIELD, Strike Team Delta (Marvel), Strike Team Delta Origin Story, how Natasha joined SHIELD, nothing graphic, trigger warning for mentions of suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-19
Updated: 2021-01-19
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:42:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 21,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28176345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShootWithIntentToKill/pseuds/ShootWithIntentToKill
Summary: Natalia Alianovna Romanova is running from the Red Room, when she realises that she has a tail. But when that tail  turns out to be a probably insane American who threatens her life, gives her cake, and offers her a job in the space of an afternoon, the world that she understands comes crashing down.A SRIKE TEAM: Delta origin fic.
Relationships: Clint Barton & Natasha Romanov
Comments: 12
Kudos: 42





	1. Cake makes life worth living

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this a few months ago, intending to publish it in time with the Black Widow movie, but I can't be bothered to wait any longer, so I'm publishing it now. I hope you enjoy.

Natalia had been in Rome two weeks already. Her hair was dyed a dark brown and she seamlessly slipped in with the rest of the tourists and locals walking the streets of the city. Or, apparently, not so seamlessly. For the last week, she had had a tail. They were good, whoever they were. She hadn’t ever seen more than flashes from the corner of her eye, but she was under no doubt that they knew who she was.

Her first guess was the Red Room, trying to get their asset back, but no. They knew that she wasn’t someone they could watch for three days, waiting for the right opportunity to kill her – they were more of the kind of people who made their own opportunities.

They could have been a mercenary, hired to kill her – she had upset an Italian crime family last month when she shot their boss – or any of the other hundred organisations she had annoyed through her years of assassinations and espionage. And that wasn’t even mentioning almost every government agency in the world wanted her dead. In the end, it didn’t really matter who this particular tail was being paid by. What mattered was that they were good – really good. They were good enough for Natalia’s requirements, so now she could make it easy for them.

She had been hired to take out a German diplomat, who was in Italy for some conferences. She wasn’t entirely sure why an Albanian drug trafficking ring wanted her dead. It didn’t really matter anymore anyway. The sky in Rome was blue, a few fluffy white clouds and a cool, autumn breeze. It was a good day to die.

The place she had chosen was on a small side street. It was out of the way enough that there were very few pedestrians – no innocent lives to get in the way (she had killed enough innocent people while she was alive, she didn’t need another life on her non-existent conscience as she died) – but it was busy enough that her body would be found quickly. She slowed her pace as she walked down the street.

Natalia had though a lot about death. Some people may have considered it slightly morbid, but she simply saw it as practical. A quick death had always been the most appealing to her, preferably on her terms. A long-distance weapon would probably be best; she wouldn’t get to see her killer, but at least she wouldn’t be forced to fight them. Up close and personal could get… messy, and there were very few people who could beat her in a close-up fight.

“So that’s it? The Black Widow is just giving up?”

It was a male voice, speaking in English with an American accent. Central US, if she had to guess. She cursed herself silently for not having heard him come up behind her, but schooled her expression before spinning around, drawing the gun out of her purse and aiming in the same movement. He was perched on the railing of one of the balconies that lined the street, on the second floor, holding a bow with the string pulled back, an arrow pointed at her. The man had dark blond hair, and his eyes were covered by sunglasses. He was defiantly the person who had been following her for the last week, at least his figure matched, but this was her first proper look at him.

“I’m not giving up,” she said, in Russian.

“I don’t speak Russian,” the man responded. “Say that again in English, or maybe Italian, at least that’s geographically correct.”

“I said I’m not giving up.” She repeated, this time in Italian.

The man snorted. “You had me fooled.” His Italian accent was almost perfect. The dialect wasn’t from this region – rather from further north, Veneto maybe? – and there was a slight pull on the consonants that gave away his American nationality, but if she wasn’t looking for it and hadn’t been trained to find such things, she would have though he was a born and bred Italian. Certainly, the way he spoke was perfect – not in the way that it was flawless, but the way that it was flawed as though he had been speaking it his entire life, and just couldn’t be bothered to speak perfectly.

“I was not trained to _give up_ ,” she told him firmly. “I was taught to complete my mission.” And she had been careful to make sure her tail would think that her stepping into this street was nothing more than luck for him, and her mistake. She had made no indication that she had any intention of not completing her hit, spending days watching the diplomat, learning her movements, not letting her tail have any idea of her true motive, while setting up the perfect plan for him to kill her. This conversation was… not part of that plan.

The man watched her for a moment, but when it was clear that she wasn’t going to say more, he began to talk. “Fifteen days ago, according to our sources, you were hired to kill Sofia Dell by the Albanians. Honestly, this surprised our analysts. They thought you were still working for the Russians. Thirteen days ago, you arrived in Rome, and twelve days ago I was sent to kill you. Nine days ago, I spotted you in that restaurant in the street west of the Pantheon, where you ordered a glass of water, didn’t touch it, and then left a thirty-euro tip.” The American’s words made her freeze. If he saw that then he had been following her for two days before she realised. _Sloppy_ , Madame B’s voice whispered in her mind.

“Seven days ago,” the American continued, seemingly unaware of her inner turmoil, “you tried to lose me. And you managed it a few times, but then you went back to watching Dell and I found you again. We played that game for four days, until suddenly, three days ago, you stopped. You’re too good to think that I lost you, which leaves one explanation. You wanted to be seen, and the only reasons I could think of for why, is that you wanted to kill me, or wanted me to kill you, and you haven’t shown any sign of wanting to kill me. You have had plenty of opportunity to kill Dell, and if you were hired for information you have had lots of opportunities for getting that as well, so you have no intention of actually completing your job.

"Now, I could shoot you right here. No doubt you have impressive reflexes, but you aren’t a marksman, and I doubt even you could hit me with that little gun from there, and I’m normally right about that kind of thing. This isn’t the movies, where you might have time to duck an arrow. By the time you realise I have released it, it will have passed straight through your eye, destroyed too much of the tissue in your brain to be survivable, and gone through hard enough to split the bone of your skull.”

“Do you flirt with your girlfriend that way?” Natalia asked.

“I don’t have a girlfriend,” he replied, before getting a thoughtful frown on his face. “That might actually explain something.”

Natalia wondered how long he could keep his bow pulled back. There was no sign of pain on his face, but that meant very little. If she were to shoot him, he would undoubtedly loosen the string, and Natalia did not want to bet against the aim of a man with a bow and arrow. Assassins who used a bow were incredibly rare, but the rumours…

“You have no proof I want to die,” Natalia told him.

The American actually barked out laughter at that. “I don’t care about proof; I’m not a lawyer.”

Natalia hesitated. This was not how this was supposed to go. She was supposed to be lying in the alley with a bullet… or, she guessed, an arrow in her brain or heart by now. “Aren’t you going to finish your job now, so you can go back to the CIA and tell them that your mission is complete?” She wasn’t sure if he was actually CIA – he had hinted that he worked with an agency, however there were dozens of alphabet agencies that recruited Americans and wanted her dead – but it seemed the most likely.

“Not CIA.”

Or not.

“Whoever you work for then.”

The American just smirked. “If I come down, will you kill me?” He asked.

“Possibly,” Natalia admitted.

The American seemed to actually weigh the word up in his head, then in one movement he changed his grip to hold the bow in one hand, gripping the balcony railing in the other. He slid down until he was hanging be a single hand from the bottom of the balcony and then dropped, landing crouched on the street below. He stood up. The entire movement was over in seconds.

Now that he was on the ground, he held his bow in two hands again, but he didn’t pull back the string and kept the arrow pointing at the floor. Natalia, with her gun still pointed at him and without the distance between them, now had the advantage.

She didn’t move.

“What are you doing?” She asked.

“How old are you?” He asked.

Natalia was momentarily taken aback by the question. “I don’t know.” She then realised that she was even more surprised by her truthful answer than by the question.

“And in your I-don’t-know years, have you ever done something just for sake of doing it?”

That was not where she expected that chain of thought to go. “What?” She asked. She wasn’t normally that obvious about questions, but the man had thrown her off with whatever game he was playing, and that was not an easy thing to do.

“You know, like deciding to get a dog just because you want a dog, and then realising that you can’t look after a dog because you really don’t have the time to look after a dog, so you ask your girlfriend to look after it because you’ve forgotten she lives in an apartment building that doesn’t allow pets and then you have a real problem.” The man had switched back to English. She was not sure if that was intentional, or if he just forgot they were speaking Italian, but she followed his lead.

“Words are coming out of your mouth and they make a modicum of sense in a sentence but I still have absolutely no idea what you are talking about,” she told him.

The man seemed to think for a moment, before a thought came to him and he grinned. “Cake,” he said.

“Cake?” She repeated.

“Yeah, have you ever just sat down in a restaurant or a café or something and ordered a slice of cake? Not because you’re hungry, or to fit in because everyone else is eating it, but just because you really want a slice of cake.” He was looking strangely enthusiastic, for a man with a gun pointed at him.

“I don’t eat in restaurants unless I have to for a job. It is too easy to poison food.” And why was she telling him that? She was giving him information. She didn’t even know the man’s name. She still had her gun pointed at him!

“That’s depressing. D’you want to get some cake with me? There is this great place on the bank of the Tiber. The tiramisu is to die for, and the pizza’s great too.”

Five minutes ago, she had been impressed by how he had managed to follow her while staying hidden. Now, she was pretty sure he was an idiot, or insane. Probably both.

“Okay.” Did she actually just say that? Was insanity contagious?

Natasha prided herself on the way she kept calm, always thought through questions, always thought through answers. And yet, in the span of five minutes, a man had pointed an arrow at her, completely confounded her, then asked her to come out for tiramisu and somehow got her to agree. Damn.

“You’re going to have to put the gun down then,” he told her. “I mean, Italians are generally pretty unshakable people, but even they might get twitchy watching someone eat cake at gunpoint.”

Even as he was saying that, he was fiddling with his bow and arrows. The bow folded up and slotted onto his quiver. The arrows were then pushed down until the tops were no longer visible, and then he covered it with a bag. He now looked like any tourist walking the streets of Rome, but Natalia was not going to believe that he was now unarmed. She could see a slight bulge at his waist, that was probably a gun, and he likely had a couple of hidden knives as well.

She slipped her own gun back into her purse, but left her hand over it; she could have it out and aiming again in less than a second.

They then walked. The American seemed to know Rome well – at least, he knew where he was going – so Natalia let him lead and watched for any sign that this might be a trap. Other than the strange American man, and the even stranger fact that she was following him, there didn’t seem to be anything.

“Why are you doing this?” She couldn’t help asking.

“Because you have never just sat down for the purpose of eating cake,” he told her. They had moved onto busier streets; so, they had switched back to Italian so as not to draw too much attention as outsiders, and kept their voices low. Natalia had switched her Italian dialect to match the American’s own, but if he noticed he didn’t comment. “But I think you want to. It’s the little things that people do, just because they can, that make life worth living; but you’ve never done them. That’s the only thing I think I really know for certain about you, other than the fact you have impressive skills. There is a difference between living and just not dying. You have quite successfully not died for years – well, until today that is – but I think you deserve to try living, rather than just bleeding out in an alley with an arrow through your eye.”

“Deserve?” Natalia asked, incredulous. “If you know even a fraction of the things I have done, how could you ever believe I _deserve_ anything other than death?”

“Or maybe what you deserve is a chance to make up for it, to use all the abilities that you were taught to do bad with to do good.”

Natalia stared at him. “You really think it’s possible to make up for what I’ve done?” She kept the hopefulness out of her voice – filling it with disbelief and scorn instead.

“Maybe, maybe not, but it might help you to sleep easier, knowing that you’re doing some good.”

“So, you just decided not to kill me in that alley this morning?”

“If I wanted to kill you, I would have done it four days ago outside the back of that restaurant by the Vatican. We’re here.”

Natalia looked around. It was a small place, out of the way, displaying a selection of patisseries and desserts. She had been to parties where she had nibbled on some of those, but the American was right. She had never eaten one as herself, just because she wanted to eat one.

As the American walked up to the counter, and started talking in Italian to the man behind the counter, Natalia took a look around. There was both inside and outside seating. Eight customers not including them; none of them gave more than a cursory glance up when she entered other than one man, but he seemed more interested in her ass than her anything else, and was too old and fat to pose any threat. There were two exits – the door she entered from and a door behind a counter that led to the kitchen, although she wasn’t sure there was a way out that way.

She walked to a table in the corner – it was furthest away from the door, but had the best sightlines in the room and would be difficult to view from the windows unless you got exactly the right angle, at which point she would be able to see them too. She kept her back to the wall, and waited for the American to finish up buying. He did, and came back with a tiramisu as well as a large pastry, on two separate plates.

He put them down on the table, and then, rather than sitting opposite her and locking his sightlines, sat perpendicular to her, where he could also see the entire room, but had a less clear view of her. Natalia didn’t touch either pastry, so he grabbed a fork and took a mouthful of tiramisu. As soon as he had swallowed it, she plucked the fork out of his hand and took her own helping. The American shrugged, and tore off a chunk of the pastry, which he put in his mouth as well.

The tiramisu she… surprisingly enjoyed. It was not the first time she had eaten one, but somehow it tasted nicer than it had at that party in Belgrade three years ago. It was probably just because the dessert was colder.

She took a few more mouthfuls before she asked the question that had been on her mind since the man had decided not to kill her. “Do you have something I can call you?” She asked.

She had been careful when phrasing the question. It wasn’t a demand for information, nor was it asking for his real name. It was simply so that she had another name to think of him in her head, than the American.

“Clint,” the Ameri- Clint answered almost immediately. The speed suggested that it was probably an often-used alias. It may even have been his real name, at least, the name he spent most of his professional life under. It didn’t really matter at the moment. “But I sometimes go by Hawkeye.”

Now that made her freeze. The bow had been a bit of a giveaway, but even so. She had heard of Hawkeye, of course she had. There were very few people in her particular circle that hadn’t heard at least something, but the rumours were wild and often unbelievable. It was a name spoken with fear, _the man who never misses, there is nowhere you can hide that he can’t shoot you, he sees everything._ The actual facts were few, and seemed to mainly centre on his weapon of choice being a bow, although he was an expert marksman in a variety of weapons. She had heard a story from a man who had lost all motion in an arm, because he didn’t believe Hawkeye could shoot as well with his right as he could with his left.

She was so lost in her thoughts; she almost didn’t notice him talking. “So, is there something I can call you other than the Black Widow? I’m sure it is a really good name for putting the fear of god in your enemies, but seems a little over the top for sitting here, eating desserts.”

Still stuck on the fact a man so cavalier as ‘Clint’ could be Hawkeye, she hesitated before answering. “Natalia,” she said finally. It felt odd, to be telling the truth, but strangely good.

“Well then, Natalia. How would you like to work for SHIELD?”

* * *

Natalia wasn’t sure why she went with Hawkeye. He was famed for his marksmanship; at this range she probably wouldn’t have a problem killing him, despite having given up her gun, her spare gun and two of her knives. She had left the knife in her boot, and he hadn’t searched her. She wondered if that was faith in her honesty, faith in her not killing him, or faith in his own skills. It was a mistake.

She was sitting in a SHIELD safehouse, a single room with a bathroom on the side, not entirely sure what she was doing. If Hawkeye had killed her as he was supposed to, her body would be cold by now, probably a ‘Maria Rossi’ in an Italian morgue.

“I need to find a phone, get us a lift out of here,” Clint told her.

Natalia nodded, and Clint left. He didn’t tell her not to follow him, but she knew that standing around while someone was on the phone drew attention, and there were a lot of people still looking for her. Drawing attention was the last thing either of them needed right now.

In the end, he was gone for an hour. In that time, she didn’t move more than around the room as she did her normal stretches. “There’s a private airstrip about ten miles outside the city. They’re sending a jet to pick us up in about three hours,” he told her when he came back.

“SHIELD has a director, correct? Nicholas Fury? Did you speak to him?”

Clint raised his eyebrows. “You’ve heard of Fury?”

“Everyone has heard of Fury. They say he is the most paranoid man in the world. Do you really think you can convince him to take in a Russian assassin?”

“I didn’t speak to Fury,” Clint told her, answering her first question rather than her second. “I spoke to his left hand, a guy called Phil Coulson. Hopefully, I can convince him to give you a chance, and then he can convince Fury.”

“Left hand? Is the phrase not usually right hand?”

“The right hand would normally be the assistant director, whoever that is at the moment. But everyone knows that Coulson is Fury’s real go-to guy. Fury listens to him.” Natalia nodded, information spinning round her brain, but not making a lot of sense. “Anyway, if we want to get to the airstrip in time, we should probably go.”

Natalia stood up. Other than his bow, hidden by his rucksack, Clint had a single black duffle bag. Natalia had glanced inside it, it contained a change of clothes, some energy bars, some Euros and extra weapons. She had noticed that her guns and knives went in as well. He hesitated for a moment, looking at the open bag before glancing at her. “They’re going to search you before letting you on the plane. It will probably be easier if you aren’t carrying weapons,” he told her, sounding oddly apologetic.

Natalia hesitated for a moment, and then drew her last knife from her boot and handed it over. Clint was still armed, so if she needed a weapon, she could steal one from him.

They walked out of the city centre, until the crowds of people were replaced with lines of cars. From there they got a taxi, and it drove further out, until cars were rarer and foot traffic was almost non-existent. The taxi ride was completely silent, both assassins all too aware of the cab driver upfront. They weren’t comfortable enough with each other to have a conversation that would sound innocuous, and talking about anything important was completely out.

Clint stopped the taxi a couple of miles from the airstrip, and they got out, prepared to walk the rest of the way. Natalia waited while Clint grabbed his bags from the back, and it suddenly occurred to her that she was doing this with nothing but the clothes on her back, and she didn’t even know Clint’s real name. He didn’t even know hers.

“Natalia Alianovna Romanova,” she said, as the taxi disappeared around the corner. He looked at her, but didn’t say anything. “My full name,” she added.

“Clint Barton,” he told her in kind.

They didn’t say anything else, but the silence was slightly less tense as they walked. They both walked fast, and made it to the airstrip in less than half an hour.

The ‘airstrip’ was little more than a piece of tarmac, a few hundred meters long, with a small, empty shack by it. There were a couple of seats in the shack, but neither sat down, instead standing in the doorway, watching the sky for signs of their ride.

A shape was just appearing on the horizon when Natalia turned to Barton.

“You went against orders by not killing me, and now you are taking me to the people who ordered the hit in the first place.” She phrased it as a statement, but it was really a question.

“Yes,” Barton confirmed, still watching the sky.

“Will they punish you?”

“Probably. It depends on how pissed Fury is,” he told her. That was not comforting.

“And what stops them shooting both of us right here when the plane lands?”

Barton turned to look at her. “Absolutely nothing.”

In a matter of minutes, a jet landed on the tarmac.


	2. The Chance Behind a Closed Door

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Natasha finds herself in the custody of SHIELD.

Three agents left the plane as soon as it landed. Natalia and Barton started walking towards the plane, the agents started walking towards the pair, they met in the middle. None of the agents had their guns out, but they were all obvious and the man on the left was twitching his hand. “Agent Barton,” the one on the centre said in greeting. He had an Irish accent; she could tell that from the two words.

“Agent Donohoe,” Barton replied in kind.

“We’re going to have to search the Black Widow for weapons.”

Barton glanced at her, asking her opinion. That was odd, in itself, but perhaps he was worried she was going to attack. She gave a slight shrug of the shoulders to show her lack of interest, and Barton nodded at Donohoe.

“Williams, search her,” Donohoe said, and the only woman in the trio walked forward. The search was clinical but thorough; Williams took a hairpin and a small screwdriver from her that Barton had omitted to take when she was handing over her weapons. 

“And she needs to be restrained,” Donohoe added, when Williams was finished, holding up a pair of handcuffs.

Barton looked slightly irritated at that, but Natalia wasn’t sure what he expected. She was a wanted assassin with a kill count meeting triple digits, about to be taken to the headquarters of an organisation that wanted her dead. If Barton thought she would just be welcomed in with open arms, he was even more stupid that she had thought.

Again, he looked at her to see what she was thinking. “You put them on me,” she told him. He nodded, and held his hand out to Donohoe, who threw them at him.

He chained her arms in front of her, which was a sort of double-edged sword. On one hand, it gave her more range of motion and use of her hands than if they were behind her back; on the other, any tampering she did to get them off would be immediately spotted and thwarted. He tightened them enough that they wouldn’t move around, but not enough that they bit into her skin. She tested the handcuffs out slightly, and noticed that they weren’t normal; they were thicker than usual, and the way they gripped her wrists felt off.

“A new design by SHIELD techs,” Donohoe explained as he saw her looking. “Supposed to be impossible to get out of without the key.”

Natalia wouldn’t say impossible, but certainly trouble.

“If we’re all done?” Williams suggested.

Donohoe nodded, and led the way up the ramp into the jet. Barton walked beside her, not quite touching her; Williams and the agent she didn’t know the name of fell into step behind.

The jet was clearly military – rows of seating on either side facing inwards, the seats folded up. A pilot and co-pilot up front, practical and utilitarian. She wasn’t familiar with the design, but then her knowledge of planes in general was limited.

With her hand in handcuffs she couldn’t reach the seat to fold it down, so instead she sat in one of the three that had already been put down - presumably by one of the agents on the way here. It wasn’t lost to her that Barton took the seat opposite, and the other three agents sat as far away as possible, although it was a small plane – she was sure that they would have preferred even more space. There were straps on the seat, but since none of the other agents bothered, she didn’t either. It was probably just as well; she wasn’t sure how the straps would work in handcuffs.

The plane ride was silent. The pilots occasionally went onto the radio, but quiet enough that she couldn’t make out more than murmurs and radio static. The three SHIELD agents kept their eyes on her, and their hands unsubtly near their guns. Barton seemed relaxed, but she didn’t know him well enough to tell if that was an act or not. He didn’t speak either, in fact, he barely moved a muscle the entire trip. It was a stark contrast from how he had been back in Rome – not impatient per se, but seemed to always be moving; eating, checking over his weapons, checking the windows for signs of tails. Now, he had settled himself in for flight. If he really was Hawkeye, and she had nothing actually disproving that claim, then it would make sense, being a sniper, that he could stay like that for hours, or even days. Natalia, on the other hand, preferred to keep moving - staying still increased the chances of being caught, and being killed. Despite that, she mostly managed to keep as still as Barton, not wanting to show any discomfort.

The flight was seven hours, but she had no way of calculating the speed they had travelled. Most likely they had gone to the US, and probably hadn’t travelled far enough to reach the centre of the country, but they could be anywhere on the East coast, from the cities in the North – New York and DC – to the less populated areas further south.

As they started to descend, Barton moved for the first time – to stand just behind the pilots and look out of the front window.

“They have a welcoming party for us,” he noted.

Donohoe glanced at him. “You went off script and now we have a high priority target in custody. Were you really expecting anything else?”

That question didn’t deserve comment, and Barton didn’t give one, returning to his seat in silence just before there was a jolt of the plane touching down. It was slightly harder than she was expecting, but she moved with the impact. Barton did as well, but Williams took a moment to recover and the agent she didn’t know the name of had to put his hand out to steady himself.

When the jet stopped moving, the door slid open and Natalia got to see the ‘welcome party’. It included a dozen agents in full tac gear, which seemed a little overkill for a single cooperating captive, except for the fact that captive was the Black Widow, but it did mean that there would be plenty of weapons to grab if she did want one; three suits, looking bland and suit like; and a man dressed in full black leather and an eyepatch who could only be the big man: Nick Fury himself.

“Well, at least they haven’t called in the Cavalry,” Barton muttered beside her, probably to himself. Natalia wasn’t sure how twelve fully geared agents didn’t count as the cavalry, but she didn’t say anything. She walked down the ramp and into open air beside Barton, wondering what exactly she had let herself in for. Barton walked straight to Fury, seemingly ignoring the dozen agents with guns, and Natalia followed him.

“What the hell Barton? You were supposed to kill her, not bring her home like a stray puppy,” Fury demanded as soon as they were in hearing distance.

“I told you that I would find her for you, not kill her,” Barton told him. “There’s a difference.”

Natalia thought Barton was doing a very good job at trying to get shot. She found herself slightly saddened by the prospect. That was something to not think about later.

“You agreed to the mission, and the mission was to kill her, not cause the worst security breach for SHIELD since I became director.”

“It was going to happen eventually,” Barton pointed out. “You are always going to have a ‘worst security breach’. It’s in the very definition.”

Natalia was not religious, but if she was, she would start praying for Barton’s soul right about now. Fortunately (for her clothes, bloodstains could stain after all), Fury decided that the runway of a SHIELD base was not the prime spot for an execution.

“Here is how this is going to go. You,” he glared at Barton, “are going to come upstairs, and we’re going to have a long talk where you can tell me exactly why I got a call at 6 o’clock this morning saying that not only had you refused to kill the Black Widow, but you had asked for an extraction team to take her back to base.

“And you,” he turned towards Natalia, “are going to go with the STRIKE team over there, who will escort you to a cell while I decide what the fuck we are going to do with you.”

Clearly that was enough talking for Fury, as he turned and strode away. One of the men in full tac strode over and grabbed her roughly, and pulled her away, not bothering to be gentle. She glanced back once, and saw Barton out of the corner of her eye, talking to one of the suits while walking in the direction that Fury had left.

* * *

From the moment Clint saw the STRIKE team on the ground below him, he knew that he was in deep shit. Actually, he had known he was in trouble the moment he realised that he couldn’t kill the Black Widow, but this solidified it. Coulson, hell, Fury would be expecting an explanation and he just couldn’t explain it. How did you explain the gut feeling he got, the realisation that Romanova didn’t deserve an arrow through the eye, but a second chance?

After Fury strode away with his usual dramatic flair, and Romanova was pulled away by a STRIKE agent – he couldn’t tell who it was under the helmet – Coulson walked up to him. They followed Fury’s trail, and Coulson got straight to the point.

“Why, Barton?”

“I don’t know. I just had a feeling.”

“Well, you are going to have to do better than a feeling. Somehow the World Security Council found out, and they have been demanding answers all day.”

Clint closed his eyes briefly in frustration. He had a special dislike for any politicians, and the WSC sat right near the top of his ‘dislike’ list for a multitude of reasons. “The World Security Council doesn’t normally care about things as small as this. They’re normally more of a big picture group.”

“Small as this?” Coulson turned to look at him. He almost always had a perfect poker face, but right now Clint could see anger radiating off him in waves. “The kill order came from the council. Barton, do you have any idea what you’ve done? The Black Widow is considered one of the best assassins in the world, capable of becoming anyone, killing anyone. She has no morals, no code of conduct, and is wanted dead by every intelligence agency on the planet, except for the ones who want to use her; but you just brought her to SHIELD like a stray pet, and all you had to say for yourself is that you had a feeling. Of course, the Council’s getting involved.”

Coulson was just ending his tirade just as they reached the door of the office Fury was using. He didn’t have his own office on this particular base, just outside Charleston, but he had commandeered the use of the office that was normally used by the agent in charge. The sign on the door said _Catherine Hagan._

Clint stared at Coulson, uncertain after his outburst. Coulson almost always had a calm ‘nothing phases me’ attitude. “I’m not sorry,” he told the agent. “I can’t explain it, but I know it was the right thing to do.”

Coulson stared at him hard. “Don’t keep him waiting,” he said eventually, gesturing at the door. “I have fires that need putting out.”

Coulson strode off down the corridor, and Clint pushed open the door to the office. Fury was sitting behind the desk, looking for all the world like he owned the space (which, as Director of SHIELD, he technically did) despite the family photos that were quite obviously not his.

“Sir,” Clint said.

“So,” Fury looked menacing in his black leather which, Clint supposed, was kind of the point. “Do you want to explain why the Black Widow is sitting in our holding cells downstairs rather than an Italian morgue?”

“Romanova,” Clint said quietly.

“Excuse you?”

“She told me her name was Natalia Alianovna Romanova.”

Fury looked at him carefully with one eye. “She’s a professional liar. You believe her?”

“I do.” And that, Clint was sure of.

“So then, why is _Romanova_ sitting in our holding cell downstairs?”

This was the part he had been dreading ever since he had decided not to shoot. If he got this wrong, Romanova would be shot. If he got this very wrong, he would be shot as well. Unless he got this perfect, it was unlikely she would ever see the outside of a cell again. Clint had skills, but the most diplomatic he usually went was waiting until a target moved off a particularly expensive rug before shooting them. Coulson’s voice rang out in his head; _considered one of the best assassins in the world._ His own voice; _It surprised our analysts. They still thought you were working for the Russians._ Natalia; _I was not trained to give up_. _I was taught to complete my mission._ He mentally crossed his fingers, and looked Fury. “Because you told me to.”

“I told you to kill her, Barton, and last I heard, dead people can’t walk.”

Clint tried to convince himself that this was just Fury testing him – he always liked drama. It didn’t work, but he powered ahead anyway, completely aware that he was probably just digging himself into a deeper hole. Turning a mess into more of a mess was one of his specialities. “You did. But if everyone said what they meant, then this would be a very different world. When you gave me the Black Widow file, it included the entire SSR mission report on Leviathan from sixty years ago, the reason being that SHIELD believes that it was a precursor to where Romanova was trained.

“Most of that wasn’t about the training though, at least not specifically; it was all about the conditions, the way that they raised, how they never got a childhood, the brainwashing techniques. Peggy Carter’s observations from when she broke into the facility. There was no reason to include it if the job was just an assassination, if you wanted me to see her as nothing but a cold-blooded killer. You know I have a soft spot for kids.

“Outside, just now, Coulson said that Romanova has no morals, no code of conduct. But why would someone with no morals feel guilty enough to want a way out?”

“So, she’s suicidal? You aren’t selling this, Barton.”

“I didn’t say she wanted to die; she just wanted a way out, and the only way out she could see, the only one she knows is death. Maybe it was her reputation, or her training that made her incapable of killing herself, but she needed me to be the one to kill her. She wanted an escape; I just gave her a better one than death.”

Fury didn’t speak for a long time, and Clint waited. He could be patient when waiting for a target, and this was a very important target. He had said everything he could, and he knew he was right about Romanova. Now he just had to hope he was right about Fury. If he wasn’t… Natalia would pay the price.

It felt like hours, that Fury sat there, assessing him, when finally, “This isn’t just about the Leviathan file. What else is it?”

Clint tried to hide his sigh of relief, and he mostly managed it. It wasn’t confirmation, but it wasn’t complete denial either, and Fury hadn’t tried to shoot him on the spot. “Coulson said that she is one of the best assassins in the world. There isn’t a lot you wouldn’t do to have one of the best assassins in the world on your payroll.”

“You’ve been going for over a week with almost no rest,” Fury told him, without acknowledging his previous statement. “Find a room, go to sleep and please clean yourself up. I’m going to decide what to do with Romanova.”

Clint took the dismissal. There was no conformation he was right about his hunch, and it was likely he would never know, unless Romanova or he was shot. He was opening the door when Fury spoke again, almost too quietly for Clint to hear. “I already do.”

* * *

The STRIKE team had made Natalia change into a set of grey sweatpants, a grey t-shirt, and grey sandals. No pockets, no string on the pants; difficult to weaponize. They took her old clothes, and left Natalia in a holding cell. As cells went, she had been in worse. Much worse. There was a bed in one corner; experimentation with the sheets and pillow proved that that they had been made strong and impossible to tear with her hands.

There was also a toilet, sink and shower behind a screen, giving a modicum of privacy from the one-way mirror against the back wall and the camera in the corner. She walked the length of the mirror, trying to see past it into the other side, but either there was no one there, or they were being still enough that she couldn’t make out their silhouette.

She started to stretch. Her training made her flexible, and she used it; leaning backwards until her hand brushed the floor, and then forward, pulling her face towards her knees and repeat. Then leg stretches, her foot to her head, and out to the side. All challenging stretches that had taken her years to master, but now she could make them look easy. She had loved dancing as a child, even when she was forced to dance until her feet bled, repetition after repetition of the same moves. Even when they took the dancing and used it to teach them how to kill, she loved it. But she wasn’t going to dance here – not in front of a camera, and whoever might be standing behind the mirror. The stretches were as far as she was going to go.

She wasn’t really sure how long she stretched for. She could have kept the time, had she wanted to, but she didn’t really see the point. Hawkeye had refused to kill her, convinced her to go with him, and if she spent the rest of her days in this room, or out there working for SHIELD like Barton had said he wanted for her, she at least was out of the Red Room’s grasp. _You will always be a killer_ , a voice in her mind whispered. The time didn’t really matter, but after what may have been minutes or hours, a knock on the door sounded.

It seemed a little pointless, knocking. The door only opened from the outside, so she couldn’t exactly welcome her ‘guest’; coming in was up to them. She stood anyway, watching the door as it opened. It revealed an elderly lady – probably in her seventies or eighties, with a cup in each hand. She walked in.

“Tea?” she asked, holding out one of the cups. Natalia took it, but didn’t drink, instead looking the woman up and down. She had an English accent, and her grey wavy hair just touched her shoulders. She wore a matching suit jacket and skirt, but it was unremarkable, probably from a department store, and she had a ring on her finger; a simple band, no engravings Natalia could see.

The woman smiled slightly. Her face was wrinkled but her dark eyes were sharp, keen. “Do you mind if I sit down?” She asked, glancing at the bed. “I’m afraid my legs aren’t quite what they used to be.”

Natalia just shrugged in indifference, and the woman sat.

“Are you supposed to be the good cop?” She asked, glancing at the steaming tea.

The woman gave a short laugh. “I’m afraid that if Nick wanted a ‘good cop’ he picked the wrong woman for the job. No, I’m just here to talk to you.”

“Who are you?” Natalia asked.

“Giving up already?” The woman sounded slightly disappointed.

Natalia sat down on the floor, her back against the wall opposite the woman. She could think of a dozen ways to hurt the woman: _Throw the tea at her as a distraction, put her in a choke hold, use her as leverage to be let out_. The tea remained steady in her hand.

“I once knew a young woman like you,” the woman said.

 _You are the Black Widow, pride of the Soviet Union. There can only be one Black Widow._ “There is no one like me,” Natalia replied.

“Hmm,” the woman said, sounding unimpressed. She placed her own cup on the bed and held up one of her hands. “She had scars, on her wrist, right here” she explained, touching her own wrist. “They were from when they used to handcuff her to the bed at night. She used to do it to herself, too; I suppose it’s a difficult habit to break.”

Natalia didn’t say anything, and kept her face blank, but that didn’t deter the woman.

“I notice you don’t have the same markings. Did they start realising that the markings were too obvious, started using padded cuffs instead?”

Natalia hesitated, before saying, “This woman you knew. Who was she?”

The woman smiled. “I never knew her real name. I sometimes wonder if she did. But when I knew her, she was calling herself Dottie Underwood. She didn’t have friends; I’m not sure she really knew how. But I think that she considered me something like a friend, in her own way.”

“What happened to her?” Natalia asked.

The woman smiled slightly. “She disappeared one day, and I never saw her again. But I like to think that she found her own path, managed to live the life that she wanted to live, rather than the one that was set for her.”

Natalia sat silently for a minute, taking that it. “Do you think she really could have? Broken free, made her own life?”

“I don’t know, but I do know that SHIELD was made for people who wanted to find a different path from the one they were on. I was supposed to get married and raise a family, not fight in a war. Nick Fury was a black man in a time where the world was not friendly to black men. Your friend Clint Barton… well, everyone is here because they want to change things, become a part of something bigger.” Natalia wondered what the woman was about to say about Barton. Her stomach twisted at the word ‘friend’. She imagined her mentioning Barton was more a deliberate comment than an accidental slip, and she wondered what her endgame was.

Her point though, was not lost on Natalia. From the day she was taken in by the KGB, whether it was from an orphanage or the streets or from the arms of her parents, her path was decided for her. Even after she had broken out of the Red Room, started taking her own contracts, she still spied and killed, for clients no better than the ones she had left. It was, after all, what she was made for. And then a street in Rome, where she finally saw a way out in the shape of an arrow through the heart; yet instead of death she was sitting in a room talking to a woman about the ability to live how she wanted to live.

The woman watched her for a while, before standing up. “I’m afraid that I must go. I’m sure that those buffoons out there will send in some food for you shortly.”

She walked towards the door, and waved at the camera. The door unlocked and swung open. “Wait,” Natalia said, just as the woman was leaving. She turned back. “Thank you, Director Carter.”

Peggy Carter smiled, and the door swung shut as she left.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Dottie Underwood Peggy Carter mentions is from the TV series ‘Agent Carter’. Great series, would really recommend it to anyone who hasn't already seen it.
> 
> Also, when Clint is talking to Fury, I want to make it clear that in my headcanon, when Clint decided not to kill Natasha/Natalia, it was entirely his own choice. He did not think that it was what Fury wanted, but he decided to do it anyway. I hope I made that clear enough in the story; I think that anything else would take away from the choice he made. Whether Fury wanted the Black Widow killed or saved, I have left deliberately ambiguous. The idea is based on a Tumblr post I saw. Maybe he wanted Clint to not kill her; maybe he wanted Clint to see if she could be saved, and make his own choice; maybe Clint was desperate to save her, and was making it up. I'd love to hear comments with your own opinions.


	3. The Worth of a Life Gone By

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Natalia begins the new period of her life in the custody of SHIELD, meanwhile, Clint is given his punishment.

The next morning, when Clint left the room had found the night before, Coulson was waiting for him.

“Director Fury wants you away from SHIELD,” he explained. “He has sent you on an indeterminate amount of unpaid leave, effective immediately.”

Coulson was very good with wording, but Clint saw through his comment instantly (maybe he was supposed to). “Suspension? Fury’s benching me?”

Coulson sighed his classic I’m-disappointed-in-you-and-if-I-were-any-less-of-a-man-right-now-I-would-probably-punch-you sigh. Clearly, he had got his composure back after last night. “You disobeyed a direct, high-level order, Barton, and you’re lucky that you aren’t sitting in the cell next to Romanova right now. People are calling for your head; Fury needs you away from SHIELD right now. It’s either suspension or a long-term surveillance op in northern Tibet, and trust me, you don’t want that.”

“Is that from personal experience, Phil?” If Clint was hoping to get Coulson to smile, he completely failed. He tried a different chain of thought.

“Can I at least see Romanova before I go?”

Coulson didn’t hesitate, so either he had pre-empted the question or he was very good at thinking on feet. Given it was Coulson, it could very well be either way. “Fine, but be scarce within two hours. And I mean it Barton.”

Clint nodded, and went back into his room, already thinking of the people he needed to talk to, to get what he needed…

* * *

The lights turned back on exactly eight hours after they had turned off the night before. Natalia knew; she had spent the night awake, counting the minutes. They weren’t going for sleep deprivation then. With the arrival of light came breakfast and a change of clothes, identical to the ones she was currently wearing, apart from the fact they were two sizes smaller. Clearly, SHIELD had got her measurements from the clothes they had taken off her, because when she tried them on after her shower they fit almost perfectly. She then concentrated on the breakfast, a square of… something that was presumably meant to imitate food. She checked it over carefully, looking for any signs of drugs that they may have added, but not knowing what it was supposed to look like hindered her ability to find, or smell, tampering.

She was just weighing up the pros and cons of eating it compared to going hungry when the door opened and Barton entered, carrying a pile of… things.

“So,” Natalia summarised in a carefully bored tone, “they haven’t killed you yet.”

“No need to sound so upset about it. And here I was, trying to be nice.”

“Congratulations,” she said, keeping her face straight, “you have already failed.”

“Hmm, yeah, well, I brought pancakes, so I hope that makes it up to you.” He plucked a plate from the top of the pile, and put it in front of her on the bed. On it were three thick, fluffy cakes dripping with a yellow sauce. She recognised the name, but pancakes were not something she had ever tasted before.

“Are these poisoned?” She asked suspiciously.

“What? Seriously? Get your mind out of the morgue, Natalia. Not everything is trying to kill you,” he said, looking slightly surprised at what Natalia thought was a perfectly reasonable question. “I mean, poisoning pancakes? That’s blasphemy. Pancakes are for enjoyment, not murder.”

“Do you want one?” Natalia asked. It was an obvious trick, and he would definitely see it, but that didn’t really matter. It would prove well enough whether or not Barton thought the pancakes were poisoned, at least. Barton tore one in half without even hesitating, and bit into it. Natalia bit into the other half, and felt her eyes go wide, even as she was trying to keep her body from displaying any emotion.

Barton looked at her. “Everything okay?” he asked.

“These… are good,” Natalia said.

“Good? Good!?” Barton asked, looking weirdly upset. “I had to go and bribe Harry in the mess for these with five dollars, and a promise put in a good word for him with that boy in accounting, and all you have to say is ‘good?’ I’m offended Romanova, these aren’t good. These are heaven in three calorie-dense, syrup-dripping rings.”

“I’m very sorry,” Natalia said, not sounding sorry in the slightest. “I’ll try not to insult your pancake religion again.”

Barton narrowed his eyes. “Was that sarcasm I just heard?” Hs face lit up into a smirk. “Why, Miss Romanova, I didn’t realise you had it in you.”

Natalia pushed back the smirk that was attempting to form on her face, and took another bite of pancake. She had noticed that the dish did not come with cutlery, and she idly wondered if that was because whatever bribe Barton had used to get the meal wasn’t enough for an added knife and fork, if they had been confiscated before he entered the room, or if Barton’s strange cult did not involve cutlery.

“Anyway,” Barton said, having devoured the last of his half of a pancake, “I did not come just with offerings of breakfast. SHIELD holding cells are very boring, I know, I’ve spent my fair share of time in one; so, I bought you presents, which required even more bribes to get.” As he was talking, he was wiping his sticky fingers on his shirt, and he reached down to where he had left the bundle that she had ignored in favour of pancakes. He dropped it in front of her on the bed, beside the plate of food.

It was a pile of books, all in English. She flicked through the pile, glancing at the titles. “Animal Farm? Isn’t that the anti-Soviet one?”

Barton grinned. “Yeah, well, no one has ever accused me of being subtle. But I like Orwell, I think there is another book by him in that pile, a few more classics, basically anything I could scrounge up around the base in the time it takes for pancakes to be cooked. I hope it relieves your boredom.”

Natalia flicked through the books until she found the second one by Orwell. _1984_. There was also the entire of Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit by Tolkien, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis, and many titles she didn’t recognise.

What Barton had done was… nice. Although him leaving so many books made it obvious that he, at least, didn’t think she was getting out any time soon, and it was his fault she was in here in the first place, it was still probably one of the nicest things anyone had ever done for her. Certainly, it was the nicest thing anyone had done for her while aware of her real identity.

“Why?” She asked.

“Why?” he repeated. “Like I said, it gets boring in here.”

“Why didn’t you shoot me in Rome? I know you could have, if you hadn’t announced yourself.”

“I thought I told you, already.”

“No, you started talking about some dog you gave to your girlfriend and eating cake. You never really explained.”

Barton looked at her carefully. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “I guess I just saw someone who had never had a chance, who had never been allowed to make a choice before. I just wanted to give you an option that did not end up with you six feet under.”

“And now I’m in an underground cell. I think you failed.” Despite the comment, she kept her tone light hearted, and Barton gave a huff of laughter.

“Well, hopefully you’ll get out of this particular hole.”

They didn’t talk for much longer before Barton said he had to leave. He told her to “finish the pancakes before they got cold and enjoy the books.” It sounded oddly final. Barton hadn’t mentioned any repercussions, but there had to be some. She wondered how long it would be, if she ever saw him again; unaware that on the other side of the door, Barton was thinking exactly the same thing.

After Barton’s visit, other than food arriving three times a day and a change of clothes in the morning, Natalia had no visitors for three days. She wondered if it was an interrogation tactic; leave the prisoner without human contact so she is more likely to talk when someone eventually comes. If that was true, it was a crude choice: she was in relative comfort with plenty of food and the books Barton had brought her for distraction. She found herself not really minding the solitude.

On the fourth day, however, shortly after she had finished eating her breakfast and had left it by the door to be collected, the door opened and an agent walked in, put a chair in the room and then left without looking away from her, though never in her eyes she noticed. Then a man entered.

He was definitely not an agent; she could tell that instantly by the way he walked. He was wearing a suit, although no tie, and he had dark skin. Natalia straightened up from where she had been lounging on the bed, although the man did not instantly sit down.

“Ms. Romanova,” he began, “or do you prefer Natalia?”

“Romanova is fine,” she said. Her best chance was probably to play along, until she could work out what was happening.

“Do you mind if I sit down?”

Natalia shrugged in an unconcerned way, and the man sat.

“My name is Dr. Andrew Garner. I’m a psychologist. I want to start by explaining that anything you say to me is completely confidential, although I will be sending a report to Fury on my recommendations for a course of action following this conversation.”

Natalia concentrated on the words, putting them into context, evaluating what they meant in the same way she did during her evaluations. “You’re here to work out if I’m insane.”

Garner smiled. “Among other things. But I think I can already answer that particular question.” He paused, but Natalia didn’t take the bait.

She instead asked. “So, you work for SHIELD. Do you do this a lot?”

“I don’t work for SHIELD. I’m an external consultant,” he explained. “But evaluating the threat level of potentially dangerous individuals is what SHIELD pays me for.”

In other words, evaluating people like her. She didn’t ask another question, instead waiting to see what Garner would say next. He looked at the books that were spread on the bed and the floor.

“Do you enjoy reading?”

“I never had much time for it, before,” she answered truthfully. “But there isn’t much else to do in here.”

“No,” Garner agreed, “I don’t suppose there is. I’m sorry that you have been kept waiting these past few days, but your situation is… unique. No one is quite sure what to do with you, but everyone has different opinions.”

“Isn’t Fury the director? Isn’t it his choice what happens to me?”

The doctor raised an eyebrow. “In theory, yes, however in practice there are many people who will give their opinions and thoughts to Fury before he makes the decision. Everyone with a high enough security clearance has their own thoughts.”

“What kind of thoughts?”

“Agent Coulson, after some deliberation, has agreed with Barton that you could become an asset, although he is cautious. Much of the STRIKE team is arguing that you should pay for the SHIELD agents you killed.” Natalia had killed SHIELD agents? She did not remember that, although she wasn’t surprised. She had killed a lot of people. “My wife, Melinda, has given her usual silence on the matter. Whatever Director Carter thought was for Fury’s ears only.”

Natalia remembered how Barton had mentioned that Fury listened to Coulson. She wondered just how many people Fury ‘listened’ to. “Does everyone just tell everyone else, even those more important than them, what to do here?”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand your question,” Garner told her, although there was a twinkle in his eye that suggested he did. Natalia elaborated anyway.

“Barton defied direct orders to kill me, and yet instead of Fury getting another agent to do the job, he just accepted it. Apparently now everyone is giving their thoughts like SHIELD’s some kind of democracy. Even you are going to give your ‘recommended course of action’ later.”

“I think,” Garner said, after some thought, “whatever happens next, you will be surprised by how the world does not move in the way you think.”

Natalia remained silent, and Garner watched her carefully. “So,” he finally said. “I have given other people’s thoughts on what should happen next. What are yours?”

There were a lot of ways that Natalia could answer that. She had no illusions that what she wanted would change anything in setting Fury’s mind, however Garner’s evaluation probably could. The problem was she had no idea what kind of answer the doctor was looking for.

In the end, she decided to go with the truth, or at least part of it. “I have no idea what I want. I have no idea what my options even are. I followed Barton here because he could have killed me, maybe even should have, but instead didn’t. I wanted to know why, but I think maybe he is just a fool.”

What she didn’t tell Garner was _Barton looked at weapon but saw a person, and I thought maybe one day I would like to be able to look in the mirror and see whatever it is he saw that stopped him from shooting me._ Natalia thought that maybe he heard it all the same.

“Clint Barton is a lot of things,” Garner told her, “but a fool is not one of them.”

After the psychologist, the same day, a female agent came in. She didn’t give her name, but she did give her an offer.

“Information, about you and anyone you have worked with, anything you remember that we can use.”

“I give you information and you what? Let me go?”

“You know we can’t do that. But we will tell you exactly how we took each of the people you give us down.”

A week ago, Natalia would have laughed the agent out of the room. The next day, she was sitting in an interrogation room, spilling her life story.

* * *

Clint was called to the Triskelion just a month after he had been sent away from Charleston. He immediately went to Fury’s office to find the man.

“How is she?” he asked, as soon as he entered the office.

“She had been giving us intel for the last month,” Fury told him. “Names, dates, jobs she’s done. According to logistics, everything they have looked into so far checks out. It’s been a gold mine of information, although not all of might be so trustworthy.”

Clint had been about to interrupt, saying that wasn’t what he meant, when he had asked about Romanova but Fury’s final comment made him pause. “What do you mean?”

Fury didn’t reply, instead handing over a file with CLASSIFIED: APPROVED EYES ONLY stamped on the front. Clint opened it to see it was sections of audio transcripts from her interviews.

_[Audio transcript date XX/XX/03 with Agent Maria Hill [MH] interviewing Ms. Natalia Alianovna Romanova [NR].]_

_[00:13:00]_

_MH: Do you have any memories from before the Red Room?_

_NR: I think I was living in Stalingrad during the battle. I believe that my parents died from starvation. I don’t know their names._

_MH: Stalingrad? Are you sure?_

_NR: That’s what I remember._

_MH: Do you remember anything else?_

_NR: I remember being very hungry. And then I remember a man giving me food._

_MH: What man?_

_NR: I don’t know his name, but he worked with the KGB. He gave me food, and promised me more if I went with him. He brought me to the Red Room._

_[01:02:00]_

_MH: You mentioned your training in the Red Room included the use of intravenous therapy. What was that?_

_NR: I don’t know exactly. I would spend a day attached to an IV. It made me feel ill, but afterwards I would feel stronger. If I was injured, my injuries would fade rapidly. The effects would wear off eventually, but each time, they left me slightly stronger, and I would heal slightly faster than I did before._

_MH: How long did you take these injections for?_

_NR: They started a few years after I was taken to the Red Room. I don’t know how old I was. I would have one every few months until my graduation. I do not remember having any afterwards._

_[02:57:00]_

_MH: What was your role in this event?_

_NR: I was sent to intercept the package the spy was sending to the American embassy in Moscow, before it could be shipped to the USA under diplomatic protection._

_MH: What was the date of this event?_

_NR: I don’t remember exactly, but it was June or July of 1959._

_[04:24:00]_

_NR: I assassinated the target and then returned to the safehouse to receive my next orders._

_MH: Earlier you told me that on that very same day, April 17 th, 1967, you were dancing in Moscow with the Bolshoi. You could not have been in both places at once._

_NR: I am aware of that._

_[Audio transcript date XX/XX/03 with Agent Maria Hill [MH] interviewing Ms. Natalia Alianovna Romanova [NR].]_

_[1:19:00]_

_MH: Do you know the real name of the man you did this mission with?_

_NR: No. His handlers called him soldat [soldier]. He had a metal arm, with a red Soviet star on the shoulder. My handlers told me he was the зимний солдат [winter soldier]._

_MH: After the end of the mission, did you ever see him again?_

_NR: Yes, I did two more missions with him. Once, in 1970 and once in 1982. He didn’t remember me either time._

_[2:49:00]_

_MH: What happened after you killed the chancellor in 1983?_

_NR: I don’t know. The next thing I remember is the fall of the Berlin wall, in 1989._

It went on for pages throughout multiple sessions over a month; Natalia Romanova doing impossible things in impossible places at impossible times. Clint skim read it, before putting the file down.

“That’s the highlights, but the entire of Romanova’s story until a few years ago are full of holes and contradictions,” Fury told him.

“I know my history knowledge verges on non-existent, but I’m pretty sure the Battle of Stalingrad was World War Two, as in, the 1940’s.”

Fury nodded. “1942, possibly the bloodiest battle in history, with millions of dead. Stalingrad was renamed Volgograd in 1961 during Khrushchev’s ‘de-Stalinisation’ of the Soviet Union.”

“But she looks – and moves – like she’s what? Twenty? Twenty-one? And she hasn’t had plastic surgery, I can spot that kind of thing. This-” he tapped the file- “makes her sound like she’s almost seventy, which is... impossible. Right?”

“There are a few options,” Fury told him. “She could be making the entire thing up-”

“Doesn’t fit,” Clint instantly said. “Romanova is a professional liar, but even she would never make up a cover story so ridiculous, especially on the fly; with everything she says being fact checked, one mistake and the entire thing blows.”

Fury nodded. “-The Soviets could have implanted the memories of previous agents and made her think they were hers-”

“That just doesn’t make sense, putting so much sensitive information into one person.”

“-or she’s telling the truth.”

“…Damn.”

Clint glanced back at the file. APPROVED EYES ONLY. “Who else knows about this?”

“Maria Hill, who did the interviews. She’s young, but careful and sworn to silence. The analysts who are fact checking this stuff have no idea where the source is coming from, they only get the events and the date to confirm. I wiped the recordings as soon as Hill and Romanova finished yesterday, and the only place to find any of the transcripts are in that file-” he nodded to the one he had given Clint “-and the full transcripts right here.” He patted a much bulkier file beside him.

“Coulson, May?”

“Went on a long-term mission three days after you left. At the moment, they don’t even know the interviews have taken place.”

“Then why are you telling me?” Even before Clint had finished asking the question, he realised the answer. “You want me to watch Romanova, confirm it.”

“I want you to watch Romanova for many reasons; if she’s spying on us, I want to know. If she can be trusted, I want to know. If she’s suicidal, I want to know; Andrew Garner spoke to her, but even he had difficulty reading her.”

“If she’s going to commit suicide, she won’t kill herself. She’ll start killing other people until someone manages to shoot her.”

“Then, if she starts killing, at least I get the knowledge you died first for getting us into this mess.”

“Your love for me is overwhelming, sir.”

“I have no love for you, Barton. I tolerate you because it would be too much work to try and find another sharpshooter as good as you, and despite the number of times you’ve gone rogue, you still somehow manage to have one of the highest success rates in SHIELD history.”

And that was the way Nick Fury expressed affection. It was kind of heart-warming, in Clint’s personal opinion.

“If she is telling the truth, and she is almost seventy, what the hell were in those drugs they were giving her?”

“We don’t know, and apparently neither does Romanova. But a best guess? Some kind of bastardised version of the super soldier serum. There were rumours the Soviets managed to create a mostly-working version, although I never put much faith in them before now. The Soviet Union did like embellishment.”

“And the soldat she mentioned?”

“The Winter Soldier is a ghost story. It’s who some people claim killed certain people, when they don’t know who really killed them. He has over a dozen credited kills over the last sixty years, with no evidence he actually exists.” Fury sounded sceptical, but he pushed a piece of paper forward which was mostly a list of names. Clint gave it a cursory glance.

“You can cross Beauvais off, that was me; an M82 SASR at 2,000 yards. But Romanova says he’s real.”

“Romanova also says she danced at the Bolshoi in Russia while killing a man in Cuba. I’m not putting faith in Romanova, whether what she says she thinks is true or not.”

Clint accepted Fury’s statement. “So, what happens to Romanova now?”

“All the relevant information has already been given to analysts. These transcriptions will be hidden where no one will find them, other than the last five years which will go into her file.”

“And she is released and brought here so that she can follow me around base for months. You know that in about three months’ time…” even in the safety of Fury’s office, he wasn’t going to finish that thought, but Fury seemed to get it.

“I know, you can deal with that in three months’ time,” Fury told him sharply. “But I don’t want you bringing a potentially deadly assassin to DC. Take her to the Kansas base. Also, before you are allowed release her, there is one more thing you have to do.”

Fury placed something else in front of Clint, and he stared at it. This was exactly the kind of horrible, cruel torture he had come to expect from someone as devious and unsympathetic as the director of SHIELD. “You have to be kidding me.”


	4. A One-way Road

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Natalia is given the chance of a new start, and she and Clint have a deep conversation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy New Year, hope you enjoy.

“Paperwork!” Natalia looked up as Barton barged in.

Her month of questioning by the cold but effective Maria Hill on her entire life story had finished two days ago. She had finished reading all the books Barton had given her (for the second time) yesterday. She hadn’t seen anyone but Maria Hill, the agents who escorted her to and from the interview room, and Garner three times a week. She hadn’t seen Barton since the morning he brought her pancakes. She hadn’t seen the sun in longer.

All those things she could ignore. She had plenty of training of that – and worse – in the Red Room. That didn’t stop the tiny slither of joy she got when she heard Barton’s voice, but she instantly cursed herself for being so weak.

“So, they didn’t kill you,” she said.

“They are killing me,” Barton replied, not sounding like he was joking. “Do you know how much paperwork I have to do? I think I prefer Tibet.”

“They sent you to Tibet? Is that where you’ve been for the past month?”

“No, Fury suspended me. They were only threatening to send me to Tibet. But they did actually give me ridiculous amounts of paperwork. I mean, a report on what I was doing and thinking for every minute since I landed in Rome. How the fuck am I supposed to remember that?”

“If you have just come here to complain to me, you can go.” That was a lie. She would be happy with Barton’s company for the rest of the day, even if he was complaining about paperwork… well, maybe just an hour. It was morning; the rest of the day was a long time.

“No, I haven’t actually.” He shoved a piece of paper in front of her, and she took it to look at.

“Agent enlistment form?” She just managed to keep the surprise out of her voice, but by the way Barton looked at her, he probably heard it anyway.

“Yeah. We fill out this and you become a ‘probationary agent with required supervision’ or something. I don’t know. But it basically means that you get out of this room, I take you to another base, and as long as I’m with you, you can move around. It’s not perfect but…”

To Natalia, this was more than she was expecting. She hadn’t been entirely sure that she would ever be let out, unless it was moving her to another prison. “It’s… it’s fine.”

Clint grinned at her, before flattening out the sheet of paper and picking up a pen. “Usually this is just a formality – SHIELD knows everything anyway – but for you we are going to be creating an identity so we can get you American citizenship under your own name, among other things. Anything that’s written here will go down as facts in your file.”

“Even if it is a contrast to what I said in my interrogation?”

“Your interrogation? It does take a month to explain all the things you did over the last few years in enough detail that we get actionable intelligence, as well as an explanation of the kind of training you were given, I understand that, but I am certain anything written here will fit what’s in your file.”

It took Natalia a while to decipher what the agent meant by that; her brain was working slowly. There was enough sarcasm in his voice that made it clear he knew everything that had been said, or at least the main points, so why… Of course. Fury didn’t want anyone to know the truth about the Red Room. He was keeping anything to do with her enhancements secret, and so was creating a backstory that people would believe, that wouldn’t include her being a sixty-year-old assassin who looks about twenty. She nodded at Barton to show she understood.

“So,” Barton began, “let’s start simple. Name… Natalia Alianovna Romanova.”

“Wait,” Natalia said, just as he started writing. He stopped; the Na done of Natalia. “I can write anything, right?”

“Right…” Barton agreed, sounding uncertain.

“Natasha,” she said. “It’s the… diminutive form of Natalia.”

“Like a nickname?” Barton asked, narrowing his eyes in confusion.

“Yes,” Natalia said.

“But… that makes no sense.”

“What do you mean?”

“What is the point of turning Natalia into Natasha? It is exactly the same number of letters so it has nothing to do with shortening it; it takes pretty much the same amount of time to say. I mean… nicknames, I shorten Clinton to Clint, but that’s because Clint is very slightly less dumb. Coulson goes from Phillip to Phil… I think, I’m not actually sure his name isn’t just Phil, but anyway, it’s because it’s shorter. Natalia though… it’s not a dumb name, Natasha is just as long and you aren’t just taking letters out, you are literally replacing them. A nickname would be Nat or Talia, not Natasha.”

“It’s Russian,” Natalia told him, narrowing her eyes in (mostly) mock anger.

“Russians are weird,” Barton replied, before writing onto the paper. She glanced down, and her lips twitched when Clint moved his hand and she could see the word ‘Natasha’.

“And your last name?” Barton asked. “Do you want to do anything with that? Maybe replace the ‘m’ with a ‘j’ or something?”

“Romanov,” Natali- Natasha told him. “It makes it less… orthodox.”

He nodded and scribbled down something. Natasha glanced at it, and then took a longer look. “What the hell? You’ve gone and butchered it.”

“What?”

“It’s Romanov, with a ‘v’, not Romanoff.”

“Well, we have a slight problem then. I mean, I’m writing this in pen, and I don’t exactly have a spare sheet.”

Natasha looked at the name again. _Natasha Romanoff_. It wasn’t Russian, but it wasn’t American either. It was somewhere between the two, an anglicised version of the name she had been given, but still with Russian heritage.

“It’s fine,” she told Barton. “I like it.”

“Well then, Natasha Romanoff, you need a birthday.”

Natasha hesitated. A birthday. It shouldn’t be this hard, to pick a random date in the year. She had never cared about a birthday before. She wondered about the date that she had decided to die, and had instead met Barton, but even that didn’t feel quite right. Maybe it was the obviousness of the date; she was neither an obvious nor sentimental person. _If I wanted to kill you, I would have done it four days ago outside the back of that restaurant by the Vatican,_ Barton had said. “November 22nd,” she told him. If Barton didn’t understand, she wouldn’t tell him. He wrote down in silence.

“And a year?”

Again, Natasha hesitated. Depending on the day, she could pass for anything from 15 to 30, but she should probably make herself at least 18 to avoid awkward questions. In her natural state, she looked around her early twenties. She glanced around the room, looking for some kind of inspiration, and her eyes landed on the books. She did a quick calculation in her head. “1984,” she told Barton.

Clearly, he had followed her reasoning, or, at least, her eyes, because he smirked. “I told you they were good books. But, unfortunately, it means you’re only nineteen, so you can’t order drinks.”

“Only in the US,” Natasha pointed out, “and anyway, is that not what fake ID’s are for?”

Clint snorted, and moved on to the next question. Throughout the next hour they filled out what they could; sometimes, they made something up; sometimes they ‘withheld details’; very occasionally they actually told the truth (mostly on the questions she couldn’t answer, and there was no point making something up). She explained that she had actually spent a few months undercover studying languages at both LMU Munich and Oxford University, to get close to one target or another, so they put that down under ‘education’, more for Barton’s amusement than anything else.

In the ‘known languages’ question, Natasha had a surprising problem. “I know I speak at least twelve languages. But I only remember learning seven,” she explained.

“How does that even work? You hear a language, and suddenly you realise that you understand what they are saying?”

“Yes.”

“…I was mostly joking.”

“Well I’m not. A few years back, I was in Barcelona when I met a couple from China and I found I could have a conversation with them perfectly well. I had no idea I spoke Mandarin.”

They then did some experimentation and Natasha learnt that Clint can say “can I pet your dog?” in seventeen languages, and that she could speak Latin.

“Why do you even know that in Latin?”

“Says the girl who is apparently fluent in it!”

Once they were finished, the door opened and Natasha Romanoff followed Clint Barton out to start her new life as a (probationary) agent of SHIELD.

She stood behind Clint as he gave in the forms they had filled out to some woman at a desk and then talked to some other woman about a flight plan. Afterwards, he gave her a black duffle bag, containing clothes. There was nothing special about them – practical boots, trousers, a shirt and a warm coat, all black, but they fit well, and were different from what she had been wearing, and finally he led her outside.

She spent a few minutes just taking in the daylight. Being the end of December, it wasn’t warm, but it was certainly more pleasant than Russian winters – it was, at least, above freezing. Barton was watching her, so she motioned him to keep moving. He didn’t comment, but led her to a jet very similar to the one she had travelled in from Rome. It was empty, she noted, and Barton headed straight for the cockpit.

“You can fly one of these?” She asked in surprise.

“No, I thought I would just sit in the chair and press some buttons. What’s the worst that can happen?” And, well… that was the answer that question deserved.

“So, where are we?” Natasha sat herself in the co-pilot chair.

“Currently? Just outside Charleston, South Carolina. We’re heading to a base in a classified location.” He laughed at her expression. “Kidding, we’re going to Kansas. I hate Kansas. And it’s December 29th, if you’re interested.”

“I know the date.”

“Well, you do now.”

Natasha rolled her eyes. She looked again at Barton as he ran through pre-flight checks and talked on the radio, before pushing the plane into the air. It was hard to imagine that the man who apparently worshiped pancakes and did everything so casually, could also be Hawkeye, one of the most lethal assassins in the world, someone so dangerous that her handlers thought it necessary to educate her on, and not let her forget it. She had never seen any proof that he was Hawkeye; but then she had never seen any that suggested he wasn’t either, and it wasn’t exactly something someone would lie about.

“So, when did you fall out with Mother Russia?”

Natasha stared at him, even as he flicked some switches on the console. “I thought you heard my interrogations.”

“Seriously? There was five hours a day of talking for a month. Do you really think I was going to spend my Christmas listening to your depressing life story, even if I was allowed? I skimmed the highlights, but even then, I didn’t get as far as when you stopped working for Russia.”

Natasha looked at him. She didn’t know him well enough to be sure he was telling the truth; as far as she was aware, he hadn’t lied to her, by which she meant she hadn’t caught him lying. Everyone lied sometimes. “In the Red Room, they kept us in check by preaching about the ‘glory of the Soviet Union’,” she told him. “Conditioning. There was actual brainwashing as well, but we had been trained to resist it.” She gave a humourless laugh. “They didn’t want their assets getting into other people’s hands.

“For most of my life it worked, but after 1991, there was suddenly no Soviet Union to glorify. They tried to change the message, ‘The Glory of Mother Russia’ and ‘The Glory of the Red Room’ but it never seemed to have the same effect; maybe because I hadn’t spent my entire life listening to it. I guess they may have been able to fake memories, but they could never fake feelings. I carried on working for them for years anyway, because I had nothing else, but I didn’t have the same commitment, the same conditioning, I had before.

“About eight months ago, I was sent to burn down a paediatric hospital in the Czech Republic. I closed off all the emergency exits, removed every fire suppression system, and…” She kept the choke back in her throat, but she paused before speaking again. “300 kids died that day. Fifty doctors and nurses. I never even knew why I was told to do it. I realised that in years of killing and torturing and stealing people’s secrets, I had no idea why I did any of it. And…” she couldn’t carry on.

“And you never had another peaceful night,” Barton finished. He was staring off into the distance, out of the window, but she nodded anyway.

“I managed to escape two months later. Killed three of my superiors on the way out. But, after I got out, I realised that nothing had changed. I have a very specific skill set, and so I just traded in the KGB (or whatever they are calling themselves this week) for whoever had the money to afford me. I did that for five months-” she glanced at Barton; whose blue-grey eyes locked onto hers- “until Rome.”

“And I made a different call.”

“I don’t know what you thought you saw in me, but whatever it was, it wasn’t really there. I have done so many terrible things; people like me aren't worth saving.”

“And that is where we’ll have to disagree,” he told her firmly. Natasha didn’t reply.

She suddenly realised that she had given more to Barton in five minutes than she had given Hill in a month. Sure, she had said a lot more to Hill, but that was all cold, hard figures; dates, names, events. That was easy. She had just told Barton, a man she barely knew, her mind; what she was thinking, what she was feeling. She had torn herself apart, shown herself to Barton in a way she could never remember having done before. The voice in her head was screaming, fighting to be heard, shouting at her to stop; yet she felt calmer than she had in years. And the scariest part was, she wasn’t scared. There was a feeling, but it was different; she didn’t know what it was. It wasn’t something she had ever experienced before.

It would be a long time before she realised the word she didn’t understand was friendship.

* * *

Barton landed on a piece of tarmac just minutes after she first got a look at the base from above. She had done jobs on both coasts of America, but she had never been so far inland before.

“Is there anything in the centre of the US?” she asked.

Barton snorted. “Fields, fields, and more fucking fields. The occasional city, surrounded by even more fields.”

There was only one reason that someone could have so much hatred towards a place. “You’re from around here?”

“I was born in Iowa, couple of hundred miles north-east of here. But this entire area is all pretty much the same.”

 _Fields, fields and more fields._ The one way to ensure that the Black Widow didn’t kill – make sure that there is no one around for her to kill.

The plane pulled to a stop on the landing strip beside the base. Instantly a ground crew rushed out and began securing the jet.

“They’ll sort out the jet, come on,” Barton said as the ramp at the back of the plane lowered. They walked out, Barton looking up at the cloudy, grey skies. “It’s going to rain,” he muttered.

Natasha was more interested in the surroundings. The SHIELD base was encased in nothing more than two lines of barbed-wire fencing, with a couple of guards slowly walking the perimeter. Outside the perimeter was exactly what Barton had said; nothing but a flat expanse of grassland for as far as her eyes could see. It wasn’t quite like anything she had seen before – the best association would probably be some of the grassland in Germany or France, but this was different. It wasn’t the plants (which would stand out in Europe to a trained eye, although she was not one) but the smell, and the entire feel of the country just felt different. It was a strange feeling; especially given she wasn’t exactly new when it came to travelling.

Over the next couple of hours, she settled into her new room – it was smaller than her cell, but also wasn’t a cell so she decided that it was probably the better deal. She went to get an entire new wardrobe from the SHIELD stockpile, as there apparently wasn’t a shop in fifty miles, and wasn’t a clothing store in further (and also, she wasn’t allowed off the base, but that was a negligible issue according to Barton). She was also shown around the base. Barton had apparently spent a few months here a couple of years ago, and knew his way around pretty well. By the time the tour had finished, Natasha also knew her way around, which was probably a mistake. When she had told Barton that, he just shrugged and asked if she wanted to get some lunch.

The SHIELD cafeteria looked like any generic canteen, although the food was surprisingly not awful. She wouldn’t exactly describe it as good, it tasting like it had been made in large batch cooking (which, of course, it had), but she had eaten worse. A lot worse. She let Barton go in front of her and picked out exactly the same food he did. She saw him glance at her plate, but didn’t comment.

He let her go ahead of him when it came to choosing where to sit, and she picked the table in the corner, which had good sightlines to both doors and the window. Barton, rather than sitting opposite her and blocking his own sightlines, sat perpendicular to her, just like he had in Rome.

“So, what happens now?” Natasha asked.

“We finish eating lunch, or is it dinner? What’s the time? Anyway, we finish eating and then we go and break into a room with a television and find a movie to watch.” You could describe Barton with a lot of words, some of them unpleasant, but he wasn’t stupid. An idiot, perhaps; insane, almost certainly; but he knew full well that wasn’t what she was asking, which meant that it was some kind of test or manipulation. She wasn’t exactly happy with that thought; she had had enough of these kinds of ‘tests’ in the Red Room, and Barton hadn’t struck her as the manipulative sort. It was worrying, that her judgment of him may have been so far off.

“That wasn’t what I meant,” she told him.

He hesitated for a moment, and Natasha wondered what kind of game he was playing. “Honestly, Romanoff, I don’t know. My current job is to attempt to stop you killing anyone, or at least be first in the line of fire if you do, and work out if Fury can actually get a SHIELD agent out of you.”

“And if he can’t?”

“I have my continued employment riding on this, but more importantly I have twenty bucks. Natasha Romanoff, you will make one of the finest SHIELD agents to ever carry a shiny badge.” He had got serious all of a sudden, and then instantly let out a snort of laughter at complete contrast to his mood a fraction of a second before. “I’m just kidding. If you don’t want to, no one will force you to become an agent; that isn’t something SHIELD does. It tends to create a negative working environment. If you want to become an agent, I’m sure there is nothing stopping you; you’re already better than anyone else here. But if not, what do you want to do?”

Natasha almost wanted to join in Barton’s laughter at the idea wanting to kill the boss and everyone else in the vicinity was considered a ‘negative working environment’, but Barton’s question stopped her. What did she want to do? “No one’s ever asked me that before,” she admitted to him.

“Well, sucks for them. So, what do you want?”

“When I was younger,” she told him, in a way to postpone the question, “I wanted to be a dancer. At the Bolshoi. The Red Room used to teach us to dance; they used it to control us, to teach us strength and discipline. That never stopped me loving it.”

“And now?” Barton asked.

“I’m a killer, an assassin, a weapon, and nothing will ever change that,” she said firmly. “If I could have a normal life, away from all this… I don’t think I could. To do… what? Dance? Get some normal job? Get married? After everything I have done, I don’t think I could ever manage it. I could never stop looking over my shoulder, watching every person on the street, waiting for my past to catch up to me. I would never rest. I don’t even know what I would do with myself.”

She hadn’t explained herself well; for a woman supposed to be so good with words, she was kind of failing. She couldn’t explain the knowledge that she would drown in the ghosts of the people she had hurt and killed, that while she had a ledger soaked red in their blood she could never rest. In Rome she had saw that her only way out of this life, the only way that she could finally rest, was death. Hawkeye had given her a different option, the chance to atone, to make up for her past crimes. She would never be able to rest, not properly; but while she might never get rid of that red in her ledger, she could relax a little at night, knowing she was using the skills she had been taught to use to kill, for a better reason.

She had no idea how to tell those thoughts to the man sitting with her. But Barton nodded, as though he understood, and maybe he did. The information on Hawkeye she had been taught in Russia was limited; no one had ever been able to put the name to a face (or to a real name), but they did know that he had started operating over a decade ago. The man was only about thirty now, which meant that he had spent his entire adult life, maybe even longer, killing. She doubted that he would be able to settle down with some nine-to-five desk job in an office either. It just wasn’t who they were.

“There are some roads,” he agreed, his tone understanding, “that once you start going down, you just can’t stop. And there is no turning back.”

Natasha gave a small, but real smiled. “And I am about a million miles down one of those roads.”


	5. Agreement Starts With a Choice

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Natasha settles in to life at SHIELD, begins to see the difference from the Red Room, and learns more about her strange captor/saviour.

As it turned out, Barton was completely right about what happened next. Not her becoming a SHIELD agent, that would still be several months down the line if it happened at all, but breaking into a room to watch a movie. And it was a break-in; it was amusing to Natasha that one of the most technologically-developed intelligence organisations in the world would still have old-fashioned locks on the doors of their conference rooms, but Barton picked it at a speed that impressed even her.

Working out what to watch turned out to be a problem. Barton had brought his laptop to connect to the screen, and he scrolled through the numerous movies on there.

“Is this what you spend your SHIELD pay check on?” Natasha asked.

Barton snorted. “Spy discount. There’s a guy in R&D who I helped pass his weapons qualification. In return he gave me backdoors that let me download any movie I want. Trust me, you always want to be owed a favour by a genius in R&D, they have all the best toys.”

Natasha narrowed her eyes at the man. “Aren’t you one of the good guys? Isn’t stealing movies illegal?”

“What’s the point of being one of the good guys if you can’t have a little fun? So, what movies have you seen?”

She hesitated. “We watched movies to learn languages as children. In English, I have watched some of the earliest Disney movies.”

Barton stared at her. “Are you serious? I thought you were supposed to be a spy, Romanoff. How is a spy supposed to fit in, if they don’t understand modern pop culture references?”

Natasha’s tone, her voice, even her breathing and expressions changed in that moment. “That’s that movie, with the actor, oh, I can never remember his name. It has been ages since I have seen that. Remind me.”

“What have you been doing with your life, Romanoff?”

“Killing people, spying on people, torturing people,” Natasha told him bluntly.

“Well, now you can add ‘watching great movies and becoming a pop culture nerd’ onto that list. Here, we’ll start with the big one.”

Natasha narrowed her eyes as the opening credits came up. “Star Wars? I’ve heard of that one. It’s the thing with light swords in space. Why are we starting with number four?”

“You have a lot to learn,” Clint said, in his annoyingly cheerful voice. His statement was absolutely no help to anyone, and when it was clear he wasn’t going to say more she turned to him and opened her mouth to tell him so, at which point Clint told her to “shut up and watch the damn movie, Romanoff.” So, she did.

It was a bit of a surprise when she found herself actually enjoying it. It was more of a surprise when, by the end of it, she was smiling a real smile. It had been a long time since she had a smile that wasn’t forced, and quickly schooled it before Barton turned back to her. By his expression, she wasn’t fully successful.

“So,” she asked, trying to sound nonchalant, “if that is episode four, does that mean there is an episode 1, 2 and 3 as well?”

Barton grinned. “Well, there is episodes 5 and 6, as well as 1 and 2. Number 3 comes out next year.”

“Are you going to explain this ridiculous numbering system?”

Barton laughed, and over the next hour, before he took her back to her room, she was regaled with more Star Wars trivia than she had ever had any interest in knowing.

The next morning, the sunshine floated through her window with the sound of Barton hammering on her door. They got breakfast, sitting at the same table they had the day before, and then Barton took her to a gym.

“I want to see you fight,” he told her. “I’m in the mood for getting my ass kicked.”

A few other agents were in the gym, doing a very bad job at pretending not to watch the pair. Natasha followed Barton’s lead and ignored them, stepping onto the padded mats. It was odd, the soft flooring – her trainers in the Red Room had believed that practice meant making the situation as real as possible; training included hard flooring, sometimes outside on gravel, and often fights to the death. It was needless to say that in those moments Natasha had always come out victorious.

She saw Barton slipping off his shoes, and so she did the same. She was glad that he didn’t go for wrapping his hands as she was aware many people seemed to favour in sparring matches – she had no idea how to, and she was pretty sure Barton would notice her watching and copying him. She doubted Barton would care that much, but it was a humiliation she would rather go without.

“No damage lasting more than a week,” Barton told her. She nodded in agreement, and that appeared to be the starting pistol.

They didn’t attack each other straight away – they watched each other for weaknesses in their stances, and Natasha was slightly surprised to note that Barton had very few. He clearly seemed to be waiting for her to attack first though, a smart choice. When it was clear he was not going to initiate the first attack she moved, a fast kick to the chest. He deflected it as she had suspected he would, but she was already using her momentum to spin into a punch aimed at his face.

He surprised her; rather than attempting to deflect the punch as she had thought he would, he leaned backwards, so it sailed harmlessly past him. The momentum threw her slightly off balance, but him avoiding her punch had left him unbalanced too. She used her slight stumble to her advantage; hooking her ankle around his and pulling. He fell backwards, but rather than falling onto his back, he used his hands to catch himself and throw himself into a backwards flip. She had to move backwards to avoid his flying feet, and in the moment it had taken to steady herself, he had finished his flip and was back into a stance, a couple of meters away. The entire exchange had taken barely seconds, but Natasha used it to re-evaluate her opponent. She had expected to be better than him – he was a sniper after all so would put less value in hand to hand – though it was a closer match than she had anticipated. He was faster, and more well balanced and nimble than she had given him credit for. It didn’t change anything though, she was still faster, and more skilled. She had underestimated him, but that would never happen again. Natasha never made the same mistake twice.

The next few exchanges happened very similarly to the first – Natasha struggled to get an attack in that would end the fight, but Barton continued to play on the defensive, having only a few chances to hit back himself. After this went on for a few minutes, Natasha decided to change tactics. The next time she came at Barton, she aimed her foot out as though she was going to attempt to kick him again. He took the bait, bringing his hands out to deflect the kick. She could see the confusion on his face as it didn’t land as hard as he was expecting, but before he could realise what was happening, she used her momentum to throw herself high, swinging around Barton’s shoulders. It was her turn for confusion however, as rather than falling backwards as he was supposed to; he fell forwards, twisting into a roll. She had to let go and throw herself away to avoid injury. It was the counter to the deadliest move in her arsenal; one she had no idea existed.

It was her shock, perhaps, that slowed her reaction time down. Madame B would have been disappointed when she barely even noticed the punch coming before it was connecting, snapping her head back. It was no surprise that a man with arms as impressive as Barton’s had a huge amount of upper-body strength, but the punch that connected with her cheek like a bludgeon that left her shocked. Her extensive training kicked in, however, and while she was still recovering from the punch her leg snapped out, catching the back of Barton’s knee. It buckled instantly, and she used the sudden loss of balance to wrap her legs around his, locking them down in a kneeling position, and her arms around his throat, in a choke hold that, if she squeezed any tighter, would cut off circulation to the brain.

Barton uselessly struggled for a few moments, before finally tapping out. Natasha instantly released him, rolling backwards and onto her feet, breathing hard. Barton, instead of getting up, flopped backwards onto the mat, his arms spread out. His breathing couldn’t quite be described as hyperventilation, but it was certainly close. It was surprising in a way; both of them were in peak shape, but the speed and length of the fight had left them both breathless. It was certainly the closest Natasha had come to a decent one-on-one fight, probably since she had left the Red Room, although she had been holding back. Barton had only managed one solid hit, but it left her head stinging. She wondered if that was more sniper training taking shape; rather than multiple hits and jabs to weaken the opponent as Natasha had been trained to do, he waited until he could get a single, deadly shot in. Their styles of fighting were so different, and yet that made them no less effective than each other, and it was purely hundreds of hours of practice that had brought Natasha out on top.

Barton also fought dirty, something Natasha had noticed, going for anywhere that could give him an advantage. Hair-pulling and going for places people usually avoided seemed to be on his cards, something that was also refreshing. It wasn’t like there were rules in a real fight, and he seemed to have no qualms about doing whatever it took. She, herself, had similar opinions on the matter.

They stayed in the gym for a few hours, in which time Natasha found herself teaching Barton a few moves. It went against everything she had been taught – giving away information to a potential enemy – but she still found herself smiling slightly by the end of it.

At lunch, they had a visitor – a fairly handsome, dark-skinned man that she didn’t recognise.

“Barton,” he said without introduction, standing by their table; “I heard you messed up the Black Widow op.”

Barton shrugged. “I wouldn’t say I messed it up, I just went slightly off script. Natasha Romanoff, Agent 41,” he gave as a quick introduction.

Natasha nodded to the man – Agent 41 – who gave a slightly nervous smile. “Pleasure,” he said, his voice sounding like it was anything but, and turned quickly back to Barton, though his eyes kept flicking back towards her. “I just wanted to ask if you can get your hands on any fireworks for New Years. We normally have a big display out back, but the tech who does it got reassigned a few months ago, and no one has sorted it out this year.”

“I can’t leave the base,” Barton told him. “But, if you don’t say I told you, John Anderson’s sister is a pyrotechnician. She sells fireworks to SHIELD agents at wholesale price.”

The agent grins, “thanks, Barton.” He glances back to Natasha briefly, then turns and hurries away.

Barton glances at her, slightly amused. “You sacred him,” he commented.

Natasha shrugged. “I didn’t do anything. How did you know about that man’s sister?”

“Pyrotechnics is a family trait. Anderson helped me with my explosives and bomb disposal training, and we got talking. His family lives in Kansas, so he normally works out here during the holidays, when he can’t get time off.”

Natasha narrowed her eyes. Barton seemed to know a lot of people in SHIELD, from the cook he bribed pancakes out off, to this Anderson, to the tech he got free movies from. “Do you know everyone in SHIELD?”

The archer snorted. “Not everyone; it’s a big organisation. But if you’re friendly, get people talking about themselves, eventually you learn who to go to when you need certain things. You just have to know the right people, and everyone is the right person for something.”

She thought about that. It was an interesting concept; be friendly with everyone, and they’ll help you out. It seemed like an overly-optimistic view of the world, something she had been warned against in the Red Room. They had told her that being friendly or liked meant they would only come to you when they were in need. Threats were a much more effective method of getting what you needed. Garner’s words rang in her head; _you will be surprised by how the world does not move in the way you think_. She wondered if this is what he meant. It was probably time for a change of topic.

“Agent 42? Do all agents have numbers?”

“Yes,” Barton said, clearly deadpan. “I’m agent 69.”

“I may not be an expert in American pop-culture, but even I know that one,” Natasha told him.

The man snorted. “No, not all agents have numbers. I don’t, anyway. They’re used for agents who specialise in deep cover missions; SHIELD goes after some very dangerous people, and it makes it slightly harder to find out someone is a mole if there is a number between the real person and the character.”

Natasha nodded. That made sense; most intelligence agencies used some kind of method to keep the identities of their agent’s secret. The Red Room had seemed to go for deleting the real person entirely, if they ever existed. “What other types of SHIELD agents are there?” She asked.

“Everyone below clearance level 3 are unanimously – by the upper levels at least – called rookies semi-formally or babies informally. Officially they are junior agents. Basically, they do what they are told to do.”

“You must have struggled with that,” Natasha commented.

Barton grinned. He smiled, and laughed, a lot, Natasha had noticed. It was odd for an assassin to be as friendly as he was, but he somehow made it work. “At level 3 you specialise. You have covert operatives, who get numbers like 42, specialists, senior agents and STRIKE. It is slightly more complicated than that, but that is the basics. STRIKE is the paramilitary aspect of SHIELD, and a bunch of assholes. They work in teams doing whatever they do. Specialists are the opposite – they usually work alone; a get in, get out type thing. Senior agents are basically rookies with more ego.”

Natasha nodded, trying to fit the information into her brain (in a slightly less prejudice way). There was no point asking what Barton was; his insults had made that fairly obvious. She wondered if it was a territorial thing, being rude about all the other sections of the organisation, but decided it wasn’t worth asking. She didn’t trust Barton to give her a straight answer, and she would probably find out eventually anyway.

After lunch, Barton took her to the range. It was apparently the smaller of two ranges on base, this one being designed for practicing accuracy with handguns, the other being designed for longer reaching weapons. She looked at the selection of guns, and was surprised at the range. As well as the standard American Glocks and 40 S&W’s, there were also a variety of guns from various areas of the world, including a Makarov pistol, like the one she had shot with as a child. Her eyes hesitated over it, before she selected a Glock. Barton had brought his bow, and had a sidearm at his waist, so didn’t touch any of the guns.

“Why do you use a bow?” Natasha asked.

“It’s quieter than a gun, better for stealth,” Barton said

“It isn’t as fast as a gun.” She fires off ten fast rounds, into the chest of the target.

“Isn’t it?” Barton asks, innocently. She turns to see ten arrows, all neatly in the centre of the target’s forehead, shot in the same time as her own bullets.

“What do you do if you run out of arrows?”

“I can reuse arrows. What do you do if you run out of bullets?” Natasha conceded that point to him as well.

“What happens if the string breaks?”

“It makes a decent melee weapon. What happens if your gun jams?”

Natasha glared at him. “My gun never jams.”

“Everyone’s gun jams at some point.”

“I can fight without a gun, if I need to. You’ve seen me fight.”

“If you call getting my ass kicked by you seeing you,” Barton agreed. He fired one more arrow into the target’s face (it now had an arrow through each eye and a curved line of them making a smile) and lowered his bow. “Do you want to make this more interesting?” he asked.

Natasha stopped, and put the Glock down. “Interesting how?”

“A shooting competition, me verses you. If I win, you answer a question for me. Truthfully,” he told her.

“And if I win?” She couldn’t help asking.

Barton shrugged. “Bragging rights?”

“That hardly seems fair,” Natasha pointed out. “If I win, you answer one of my questions truthfully.”

“If you want,” Barton agreed. His nonchalant attitude made her hesitate. Had she seriously agreed to a shooting competition with the man known as the world’s greatest marksman?

“Rules,” she told him, “I pick the weapons we use. Nine shots, most points win.”

Barton nodded, not thrown off by her demand on weapons. She walked back over to the weapons cache, feeling his eyes on her the entire way, and exchanged her Glock for two Makarovs. She walked back, and handed one to Barton. He looked it over. “Soviet, first official use in ’51, still used by Russian police and military today. This is the gun you learnt on?”

Natasha didn’t bother being surprised by the fact he knew all that. She would probably be more surprised if he didn’t. “It wasn’t the first gun I ever shot,” she admitted, “but the first time I killed someone with a gun… I should hate it, for that, but…” she shrugged helplessly. Barton nodded, and gestured for her to go first on the range.

She calmed her breathing, before lining up the gun. She pulled the trigger nine times, and nine holes appeared in the target at the other end of the range. It wasn’t the best shooting she had ever done, but she certainly couldn’t complain. 8 of the bullets were in the centre ring, one hitting the cross in the exact centre.

In the Red Room, Natalia had to be the best. Whenever someone was better than her at something, she would feel a surge of annoyance, and would work harder and harder, so that she could go back to being the best. Anyone who wasn’t the best was better as an example. Here, in SHIELD, Barton pulled the trigger back nine times, nine bullets hitting the middle of the cross, Natasha didn’t feel the irritation she was expecting. When you had someone like Hawkeye there, being better was little more than a pipe dream. The second she had seen him handle the gun with as much confidence as his bow (or at least, almost as much), she already knew she had lost. Somehow, she wasn’t upset about it. That thought scared her.

“So, question?” Natasha asked.

Barton looked at the target, the neat hole in the centre of the cross, and didn’t say anything for a minute. Eventually, he asked the question. “I asked you to come and join SHIELD, but when I brought you here you’ve been locked up, treated as a prisoner, have had to spill your entire life story, and are now stuck on a base with a man that has been told to his face by seven different people that he is one of the most irritating people in the world. Have you regretted agreeing to come with me?”

Natasha paused for a minute. Every instinct inside of her was screaming “SAY NO”, but was that her conditioning, looking to give Barton the answer he wanted? In the beginning, she had been shocked with herself at agreeing to go with him, that she didn’t have space for anything like regret. She had wondered multiple times ‘what am I doing?’ but had agreed to things, again and again. She had agreed to tell everything to Agent Hill. She had agreed to become an agent of SHIELD – to sign all their paperwork. And that was the shocking part. She had _agreed_ to it. Agreement meant she had a choice – the ability to say no.

She thought that she finally understood what Barton had asked her, that day in Rome. _“Have you ever done something just for sake of doing it?”_ he had said. In the last month she had chosen to spill her secrets (most of them, anyway) to people she barely knew. She had watched, and enjoyed, a movie for the fun of it. She had eaten pancakes and tiramisu and read fantasy novels and she didn’t have to do any of it. For the first time in her unnaturally long life, she hadn’t just not died; she had lived.

“No, I don’t regret a thing.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Everything in here about the structure of SHIELD is a combination of the little information we get from Winter Soldier and AoS, and personal headcanons.  
> Also, if you can't tell, I know nothing about guns. Anything in here was the result of Wikipedia, and I apologise for any inaccuracies.  
> Only one more chapter to go...


	6. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> New Year's Eve comes around, and SHIELD celebrates. Natasha's movie education continues, while Clint contemplates New Year.

New Year’s Eve was cold, but the clear skies and nothing but a light breeze meant that it wasn’t unpleasant. A large SHIELD truck had entered the base as they were eating breakfast, and Natasha could see them unloading fireworks from the window.

“Looks like Anderson, or, at least, his sister came through,” Barton commented.

The day went mostly the same as the last – they went to the gym, and although they didn’t spar again, Natasha taught Barton some more lethal tricks. Barton made the entire organisation look bad on the range, with a bored expression on his face as he performed seemingly impossible shots with his bow. In the afternoon, she got roped in to watching the second (or fifth) Star Wars movie.

“So, I suppose even you knew about Vader being Luke’s father before you watched it?” Clint asked as the end credits rolled.

“You do know that in Dutch, Vader means father. Was it really meant to be a surprise?”

Clint snorted. “It was in 1980. Even without the surprise, it’s still considered one of the best movies of all time.”

Natasha kept her face carefully blank. “It was good.”

“Good? Go- oh, you know what, I’m just going to stop trying. You will let out your inner nerd when you’re ready.”

Natasha glared at him. “I don’t have an inner nerd.”

The man shrugged, seemingly indifferent to the glare that had made some of her most dangerous enemy’s knees shake. “Everyone has an inner nerd. Apart from the people who have an outer nerd. We just need to find it.”

* * *

They walked into the cafeteria that evening to see it completely transformed. There were balloons and streamers, and someone had smuggled in what looked like a hundred crates of various alcohol – beer, wine, gin, even vodka. If Clint wore a hat, he would take it off to whoever managed that.

Officially, alcohol wasn’t allowed in SHIELD bases. If anyone was caught bringing it in during a car or truck search, it would have to be confiscated. SHIELD rules were very specific. Of course, once it was in the base, it would be a shame for it to go to waste, so even the strictest assholes turned a blind eye. Clint knew for a fact Fury kept an entire drinks cabinet in the hole behind the mirror in his office in the Triskelion, that had probably been built by some previous occupant for that very reason (and that was discounting the very obvious bottle on his desk, because really, who was going to tell the director no?).

But the alcohol first had to be smuggled through security, where it very much would be taken away by anyone who spotted it. Clint went and pulled out a beer from one of the crates, and gave a short laugh. Someone had written on the label of every bottle in felt tip pen ‘ALCOHOL FREE’, with a not very concealing strike through the ‘5% alcohol’ on the label.

He glanced at Natasha, who was looking at it from next to him, and whose face was completely blank. It wasn’t just the blank face of not knowing what emotion to feel, it was more a carefully constructed mask hiding any expression that she might otherwise let out. Clint knew all about masks, but even he found it creepy. Not so much Natasha herself, but rather the fact that someone would think teaching her to create it was a good idea. The fact that someone would sit down one day and think “you know what my brainwashed assassin babies need? To be taught that when they aren’t acting, they have to show absolutely no emotion at all.”

It was creepy that someone would both think and try it, but it was also undeniably human. Just one more way someone had taken Natasha, and created what they wanted.

This was the first time Clint had done a New Year’s Eve on this particular base, and maybe it was the boredom from the rest of the year, being one of the quietest, most out of the way bases, or maybe it was the lack of being suddenly called away on mission as often, as it was mostly a training and research base, but the Kansas base went all out on the celebrations.

The kitchen staff had blown the last of their annual budget on a huge buffet, and anyone who was seen without a drink was quickly given one. There was music, and there was more and more dancing, which moved onto tables as the alcohol levels increased.

Clint had no interest in getting hammered like much of the rest of the base, so he instead nursed a couple of beers, making the rounds of the room, talking to most of the people he recognised (and a few he didn’t). Throughout it all, Natasha stayed close to him, although he struggled to tell what she felt about the whole event. At the start people were wary of her – everyone had heard of the Black Widow since Clint had brought her in – but the celebratory atmosphere of another year survived (or more probably the drinks) loosened people’s apprehensions. She was even asked to dance a few times, which she politely but firmly declined.

At about fifteen minutes to midnight the champagne came out. Clint took two flutes, and handed one to Natasha. He then led her out of the room, and up several sets of stairs. Eventually they reached a locked door, but quick work with the lockpicks Clint kept in his pocket got those open. He opened the door onto the sharp, now cold breeze of the roof, glad that he had remembered to bring jackets and a blanket.

“This is my favourite spot on the base,” he told his companion. The truth was, the roof was his favourite spot on any base. He knew Coulson was aware the first thing he did in a new place was evaluate the roof access, but he had never brought anyone up here with him before. Somehow, Natasha being up here with him just felt right. He took her to the corner, where there was a blind spot between the cameras, and laid the blanket out on the floor like a picnic blanket. He sat down, watching Natasha out of the corner of his eye, as she slowly settled next to him.

“I’m sorry,” she said suddenly.

Clint glanced at her, but he couldn’t read her face. The problem wasn’t the darkness; being a SHIELD base there was always lights on around the fence, and they were enough to see by, for his eyesight at least. She was staring straight ahead. Her face wasn’t the blank look he had got used to seeing anytime she was worried about showing feelings – presumably she believed the darkness did that for her, and Clint wasn’t about to contradict those notions; but rather her face had so many emotions in a single micro expression that it did the job just as well for being unreadable.

“If you’re saying sorry because you’re about to push me off this roof, I have to be honest, I’m gonna be a little upset.” Clint told her.

There was a very slight twitch of her lips – almost invisible but definitely there. “No, although now you’ve put that thought in my head…” Clint grinned at the sarcasm (at least, he hoped it was sarcasm) and waited for her to go on. “You risked your job, possibly your life. You got suspended for a month, now you have to follow me everywhere. And all to help me when you didn’t even know me. You’ve given me all sorts of reasons why you didn’t kill me, but none of them…” She trailed off, pausing for a moment before finding her voice again. “I wouldn’t have saved me. I don’t think many people would have. I’m sorry for all the trouble I got you into.”

Clint had the feeling that this was the first time the Black Widow had ever apologised for anything out loud, at least when she wasn’t playing a part. “Truthfully,” he told her, “I didn’t mind it all that much. I got Christmas off for the first time in years, which was nice. The paperwork is awful, and I’m not getting a mission in the near future, but-” he looked into her eyes, hoping she could see his earnestness even in the darkness- “I haven’t regretted it for a moment. Even if I never go on another mission, it was the right call, and I will always stand by it.”

Whatever, if anything, Natasha was going to respond to that with, was cut off by the loud bang of a firework being released. Clint raised his glass. “Happy New Year, Natasha,” he shouted over the first explosion.

“Why is one particular day any more important than others, just because it requires people to buy a new calendar?” Natasha asked.

“Shut up and drink the damn drink, Romanoff,” Clint told her. He paused for a moment, and then added “and I have no idea.”

A shower of red, blue and gold sparkles lit up the sky, and on the roof two of the world’s deadliest assassins lowered their glasses from their lips. From the light of the showers of colour surrounding them, Clint could see Natasha smiling, the biggest smile he had seen on her since he had met her over a month ago.

Clint had never believed in the new year, new you stuff. Oh, he usually celebrated the New Year when it came around, if he didn’t have more important things to do, but he had learnt a long time ago that some random date couldn’t change a person. And yet, he glanced at Natasha Romanoff, a name she had had for less than a week; a new identity, a chance to fight for the good guys, and he wondered. No, Clint didn’t believe in that stuff, but, if someone was going to change, wasn’t new year decent time to do that?

Natalia Romanova was dead. She had died in a SHIELD holding cell, or, perhaps before that, in an alley in Rome. But in the end, where she died didn’t really matter. What mattered was Natasha Romanoff, the woman sitting beside him, smiling at fireworks, and her life had just begun.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, we have come to the end. Sorry this chapter was later than the others, and thank you to everyone who has read or enjoyed it. Kudos and comments mean the world to me, every one I see makes my day, so I want to thank everyone who commented or left a kudos. Bye for now;  
>  \- ShootWithIntentToKill


End file.
